Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Voting’

Electronic voting systems have long been vulnerable to tampering and hacking. This has been known for more than 10 years, but little or nothing has been done about it.

Having a vulnerable system is like leaving your door unlocked or the keys in the ignition of your car. Eventually somebody is going to take advantage of you.

If we Americans want to protect our voting systems from tampering, it doesn’t matter if the suspected tamperers are Russians, Republicans or somebody else. We need written ballots that are hand-counted in public.

How to Fight Voter Suppression in 2018 by Edward Burmila for Dissent Magazine. Twelve ways in which voting procedures are rigged against poor people, young people and people of color, and what to do about them.

I have been concerned for years about the rigging of election results, including—but not limited to—voting machine tampering. That is why I am in favor of an audit and/or recount in the current Presidential election.

I do not think there is any realistic possibility of changing the announced election results. This would require the discovery of discrepancies in all three recount states—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—large enough to change the result, and all this before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 19.

What I hope will come out of the audit / recount will be an improved process for national elections—at a minimum, a paper record and a routine audit to verify the paper record.

I didn’t vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. I am not pleased that Trump is President, but I am opposed to going to extraordinary lengths to keep him from taking office, such as trying to persuade members of the Electoral College pledged to Trump to violate their pledges. I am more concerned with the integrity of the process than which of two candidates won.

On the other hand, I do not care at all whether the recount process undermines “confidence” in Trump’s supposed mandate. Confidence is to be earned, not granted automatically.

∞∞∞

It would be unfortunate if the audit / recount process diverted attention from all the other ways in which the election process is and has been rigged.

Greg Palast

An investigative reporter named Greg Palast has been reporting on vote rigging for years. One method is the infamous CrossCheck system, whereby somebody who has approximately the same name as somebody in another state is assumed to be the same person, and the name is removed.

We the people don’t know if voting machines were tampered with. We do know about CrossCheck.

As Palast notes, the names that are checked are almost always common last names of African-Americans or Hispanics. Here’s how he said CrossCheck affected the current election:

It’s too late to give back the voting rights that were stolen in this year’s election. The best that can be hoped for is to fix things for the future.

It’s too bad that the Obama administration did not see fit to investigate this. I don’t hope for anything from Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s choice for attorney-general. Ending this corrupt and illegal system will depend on citizen activists working on the state level.

Donald Trump got more votes than predicted by exit polls. Was the problem the exit polls? Or was it hacked electronic voting machines?

We’ve known for a long time that electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.

We know that in 12 states, Trump’s excess votes exceeded the margin of error. There were four states—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida—in which the Clinton won the exit poll and Trump won the vote count. If Trump had not carried those four states, he would have lost.

Is this proof that Trump supporters stole the election? No, but it is circumstantial evidence that needs to be investigated and explained. It should not be let drop.

Donald Trump’s supporters say the integrity of the coming U.S. election is threatened by illegal voting. Hillary Clinton’s supporters say it is impossible to rig the U.S. election. They’re both dead wrong.

The real problem is the vulnerability of electronic voting machines to hacking and the lack of transparency in vote counting.

In a capitalist democracy, there are two sources of power—money power and people power.

These days money power is flourishing—partly because of court decisions that say spending money is free speech under the First Amendment, and that corporations have First Amendment rights, but more simply because of the enormous concentration of wealth.

At the same time, Republican state legislatures are rigging the election process through gerrymandering, and figuring out ways to disqualify voters, especially blacks, Hispanics and students, and make it more difficult to register to vote.

An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice indicated that the reduction in the number of votes as a result of voter suppression laws in 2014 was greater than the margin of victory in the North Carolina and Virginia Senate races and in the Kansas and Florida Governorship races.

The Brennan Center can’t prove that the suppressed voters would have voted for the losing candidate, but that’s not the point. Voting should be regarded as a basic American right. If it isn’t, we Americans might as well go back to being ruled by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats.

Elizabeth Drew wrote that it is telling how few Republicans participated in the 50th anniversary of the Selma, Alabama, voting rights march.

Investigative reporter Brad Friedman reported electronic voting machines are an even more insidious threat to voting rights, because your vote can be canceled without your knowledge. He told how easy it is to tamper with electronic voting machines without detection. Internet voting is even worse.